Wanted to brag on my fourth and fifth grade students!

They created these amazing pumpkins back during the second quarter.  I like to do this lesson every other year as my main painting lesson for the upper grades.  It takes quite a few weeks and great focus from my students, but they are so proud of their final artworks.  It combines all of the painting skills they have been developing in the younger grades into one big lesson.  

This year, I displayed over twenty of these colorful pumpkins in the school district building during my school's assigned month. 

Lesson here.

This was a new lesson for kindergarten this year!  I was searching for a lesson for early October where we could review all of the secondary colors.  We did the orange and purple and was I satisfied with having just two represented in the work, but realized we could make the eyes green with oil pastel!  Perfect!  

We created a simple orange painted paper for the background and a smaller painted paper in purple for the spider body.  A few of my classes got weeks behind, so we just used purple construction paper for the bodies. 

For the webs, we created three diagonal lines from one corner with black oil pastel.  Then we made small straight lines, filling in one section at a time.  We did this all step by step together and by the end I was much better at teaching it.  All of the spider webs turned out wonderful.  I love all of their beautiful mark making.

Creating an accordion fold was more challenging than the webs, but again, by the end I was much better at teaching it.  Even if all of the legs weren't perfect, they did it and they were proud of their work.

On the last day of the lesson, we made the sweet little faces and glued everything together.  I loved all of the creative faces they made!  I will definitely encourage more of that next year.  The littlest kids always make the greatest faces on their little characters!  

I honestly wasn't sure how this lesson would go because of the web (I usually don't do this much guided drawing) and the accordion folding, but my kids did so well!  It was a great lesson to review line types, secondary colors, mixing and painting skills, and cutting and gluing skills.  This lesson took four 45 minutes classes, which was longer than I expected, but I think it taught so many great skills and the results were worth it.  

I LOVE seeing my youngest students!  I see them during my one open block once a week because I believe it is best for the students to start coming to special area classes and being exposed to new things.  And they are the most wonderful kids to work with!  Every process is magical and they love the opportunity to explore and create.

My pre-k and ESE pre-k classes come to art together for a thirty minute block.  Total, I have thirty students ages three to five and multiple teachers and aids to help with this group.  I try to focus mostly on fine motor skills, exposure to materials, and experimenting with materials.  Product usually comes together with display, adding a frame, or drawing or cutting out a simple shape.  And often product just doesn't matter! 

These are my favorite lessons from the first half of the school year!